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I have a few vignettes that wouldn't merit a blog post of their own, but they're interesting and on my mind enough that I want to share them with you. Thus, you get four of them in one go. Enjoy, dear readers.

1. Today at school, a kid in my student government class was writing random words and drawings on my whiteboard. I made sure he erased everything before he left for his next class, though. When I stood up to teach my next class of the day (which was actually two periods after student government, since I'm in a team teaching environment), I saw that he'd left one word on the board, tucked away behind the podium in tiny letters. There it was, waiting for me to discover it.

"Feces."

2. I was listening to Radiohead's "Karma Police" yesterday while at work, and I was wondering how many times I had heard it over the course of the last decade. Five hundred seemed like a good round number to me, so I decided that this time would be the 500th time. You'd think something like that would have been terribly significant to me, but it turned out that it was a fairly typical (albeit representative) experience for me. I was alone, walking through the lightly falling snow and looking at the last rays of sunlight desperately glimmering over the intersection of 900 N and Campus Drive. Most of my experiences with Radiohead have been like that. The music never gets old.

3. A girl in one of my classes turned in her WWI essay, which I was reading and grading during our current issues class. I forget what the sentence that she wrote was, but I do remember that she included a smiley face at the end of it. I never thought I'd see the day when emoticons became standard punctuation. Given the grade I gave her for it, I doubt I will, though.

4. I had the most terrifying night vision of my whole life last night. I dreamed that my younger brother was possessed. (It's funny how in dreams you rarely have information given to you explicitly. I never heard the words "your brother is possessed," but I knew. Somehow, I just knew.) He had the redeye look that people often get in pictures where the flash doesn't go off quite right. My dad and I were driving him somewhere, presumably to have him exorcised, when I looked at him in the rear view mirror. He was just gazing out the window with a deadened, haunted look on his face. I looked into his shiny red eyes and felt absolutely terrified. He was gone, and there wasn't any way to get him back. Even after I woke up, I was really worried that he was lost and gone to us.

It still scares me to think about it.